Saturday, 27 August 2016

I have to say that I am suffering
a bit with an eye problem, to the extent of spending an afternoon in our local ‘Eye
Casualty’ department. It turned out to be quite big and busy. I was entirely
unaware of its existence until earlier in the week.

Anyway, the upshot of this is
that I have an eye problem, which is being treated with more drops than you can
shake a stick up, which is making seeing out a bit of a problem at times. I am
assured that this will pass quite quickly, but as this is being typed one-eyed,
I’m not sure how easy it will be to turn out my usual article every week or
two.

Thus: there will (probably) be a
short intermission in broadcasts.

I’m told the maximum length of
time this will last is seven weeks. At present I am in the glorious situation
of being chauffeured by the estimable Mrs P and observing the world through a
mist. I am still thinking about stuff, however and even, in my study, am
half-way through a rules test / wargame. I have already discovered holes in the
rules that you could drive a bus through.

Anyway, don’t go away, or at
least check back sometime soon, but there will probably be a short intermission
until I can see (and hence function) properly. There is nothing like an
incident like this to remind one of how important sight is.

Meanwhile, the Estimable Mrs P.
is attempting to establish who the patron saint of eyes is. Any ideas?

Saturday, 20 August 2016

Yes, this is another boring book review that will have most
red-blooded wargamers reaching for the soap opera button. But of course, I read these books and tell you
about them so that you do not have to. And so to Geoffrey Parker’s ‘Global
Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century’ (2013:
Yale University Press, New Haven).

Geoffrey Parker’s is a name that should be familiar to any
serious historical wargamer with an interest in sixteenth and seventeenth
century history. He has written extensively on such subjects as the Thirty
years War, the Dutch revolt and the ‘Military Revolution’ which, according to
some ideas around, gave Europe the military power to start to dominate the
globe in the succeeding two centuries. As serious historians go, he certainly
has the track record to produce a synthesis on the scale of the title of the
book.

The book is long and complex, the the overall thesis is
fairly simple. Parker identifies the
fact that the sixteenth century was fairly benign climatically, and that,
overall, the world population expanded, with agriculture extended into more
marginal areas. In the early Seventeenth Century, the global climate cooled. A 0.1
degree C cooling reduces that growth time of crops by one day. This may not
sound serious, but it also increases the probability of crop failure and the
probability of double crop failure substantially. If you are already farming on
marginal land, the combination of these
factors is catastrophic: the population can no longer feed itself.

To famine is then added the problems of disease. There were
few methods of disease control in the early seventeenth century, and smallpox
and the plague were rife. For example the Manchu high command was decimated
during the war with the Ming through exposure to smallpox, as were the Native
American populations in North America. The Manchu eventually ordered that only
smallpox survivors could assume high command positions.

This indicates that third issue associated with the century:
war. Political leaders across most of the world showed an unerring instinct for
increasing the miseries of their people by choosing to go to war just as the
crops failed. At the least, this lead to an increase in tax demands on a people
whose ability to pay was already compromised. At worst it entirely depopulated
areas of their country. As statistical services were almost unknown, rulers
largely decided that the population were simply being recalcitrant and started
to increase demands and threaten. This led, almost inevitably, to revolts and in
extreme cases (Portugal, Catalonia, Naples, Palermo, Ireland, Scotland,
England, China, Muscovy, Ukraine…) to war, civil or not.

These causes are interlinked. Agricultural communities under
stress have few options, assuming that quietly starving to death is rejected.
There is an increase in banditry. People flee to the cities. Political chancers
take advantage of the unrest to make a stab at glory. On the other side,
governments struggle with commitments far larger than income, and attempts to
maximise taxation also causes unrest.

The upshot of all this is a world of starvation, disease and
war. The best estimate available is that around one third of the world
population died between roughly 1618 and 1688. Some governments did better than
others ar staving off the problems. For example, the Moghul Empire weathered
the Little Ice age slightly better than others, because its hinterland was
bigger and its wars were at the periphery. Thus the bulk of the population were
spared some of the traumas of warfare, and fared a little better, at least
until later in the century.

The top spot for surviving the crisis was Japan. On the
other hand, this seems to be because the wars of the Sixteenth Century had so depopulated
the country before the Little Ice Age hit that there was no food crisis. A strng
central government also kept the lid on popular unrest, and built a string of
granaries across the country to help in times of crisis. Strict control over
foreign traders also helped reduce the issues of epidemics, although this was
not quite as total as we are often led to believe. Nevertheless, if you wanted
to survive in the mid-seventeenth century world, and did not mind too much
about your freedoms, Japan was the place to be.

Other places fared much worse. Louis XIV probably rules over
fewer people in 1700 than he did in 1661. Not only that, but his soldiers were
shorter, averaging 5’ 3”, due to the famines in the later part of the
Seventeenth Century. Constant war from the 1630’s through most of the rest of
the century dislocated French society. The soldiers of the early eighteenth
century were short (try representing that on the table).

Britain fared little better. Between 1638 and 1651 it is
estimated that half a million people died. This is on a population of about 5
million, and represents a larger proportionate death toll than the First World
War. In places, such as Ireland, things were worse. In Germany, as well,
although the scene is patchy, some areas lost half or more of their population.
Parker notes that the possibility of recovery in population is lost if women
marry later, as they tend to in times of dearth and crisis. A woman marrying at
28 rather than 18 has ‘lost’ three children, more or less. It took a century or
more for some areas to recover their population numbers to the 1600 level.

Parker’s book is designed as something of a warning. There
may be arguments over the reason for climate change (most of them sponsored by
the fossil fuel industry) and politicians are easily bought, especially those
who have no knowledge, interest, or desire to learn anything about science. Sometimes it feels like what passes for acceptable in some areas would be termed corrupt in others. However, even discounting these arguments,
the climate is changing, and does change. It is a dynamic system, after all. We
have, Parker notes, the technological and intellectual equipment to do rather
better than our seventeenth century forebears in dealing with and anticipating
the problems this will cause. However, there is little evidence of political
will to do so.

Overall, Global Crisis is an excellent book, packed full
with treats and delights for the wargamer from places across the globe. For me,
the description of the Manchu versus Ming wars were very interesting, although,
as with the rest of the book, the death, suffering and destruction created by
the wars give the whole work a very downbeat flavour.

Saturday, 13 August 2016

One of the things I have often
banged on about here is that rules which cover a long period of time cannot
represent a given, much shorter period, very well. Thus, I would contend that
DBM cannot really represent a Romans vs Gauls battle in anything but the most
abstract, bland and sweeping manner. The fact that it can even try is a
testament to the utility of the rules, that fact that it is a allowed to do si
is a testament to wargamer’s ability to accept something that is not chocked
out with period ‘flavour’.

I recently commented to someone
that sweeping rule sets have a place in wargaming. Given the above, the
response was ‘OK, well, what is it, exactly’, and I have been pondering my response
ever since. Not that I think I have a particularly original or clever response,
but I do think that it throws up something to be considered, even if I cannot
manage much about it.

Anyway, for what it is worth:
history has both continuity and discontinuity. For thousands of years, until
roughly the widespread use of handguns, battles were decided by men with pointy
sticks. I know that this can, of course, be highly nuanced, and that the type
of pointy stick can also be relevant. Further, of course, the pointy stick
brigade can and were more or less ably supported by assorted chariots,
horsemen, skirmishers, archers, elephants and so on. Context is important,
naturally, but the fact is that most men on a battlefield at a given time had
some form of pointy stick with them.

The pointy stick bearer is,
therefore, a sign of continuity across history. We could, in fact, argue that
pointy stick holders are still with us, that they did not vanish after about
1700 in Western Europe, but were subsumed into the musketeer with a bayonet.
The combination of ranged fire and the staying power of the pointy-stick (or
assault value, if you like – it depends on how you view the pointy-stick)
combined to make the infantryman more or less irresistible. If we accept this
argument, we have to accept that the bearer of a pointy stick, in all its
guises, signifies continuity across military history.

The corollary to this, in terms
of wargame rules, is that if we can get our rules for the bearer of a pointy
stick right, across all ages, then we can have a go at creating a truly
universal set of rules, valid for all time from Ancient Sumerians to the
Ardennes and beyond. Of course, we recognise some breaks in this continuity.
Gunpowder made people change stuff, as did the advent of the machine gun and
tank. However, we can just then divide history into broad sweeps, such as ‘Ancient’
(to 1500), ‘Horse and Musket’ (1500 – 1875) and ‘Modern’ (1875 – present). Instead
of writing one universal set of rules, we need three sets.

Of course, the continuity implied
in this view of history also suggests that we only, really, need one set of
rules, with bolt on extras which add to the basic set, say, gunpowder weapons,
and then another add on automatic weapons, and then some extra bits for air
power. The idea here Is still that
continuity is stronger than change.

A set of rules that covers a
broad period, as described, is focussing on the continuities of history. The
fact that a man from 1500 BC and one from 1500 AD is armed in more or less the
same way, or at least is deployed and used tactically in more or less the same
way, allows us to sweep history up into a few abstract categories. The man is
the universal solider – PS(O) – and everything can be derived from him.

This does, of course, miss an
awful lot of nuance. A Roman legionary was not the same as a French Medieval
Knight. The world views of the two were poles apart. The details of their
training, deployment, expectations and so on were simply not the same. At one
level we can subsume them both into a ‘swordsman’ class, but at another we
cannot. A subsuming set of rules is missing an awful lot of change as it
focusses closely on the continuity of warfare.

We could ask whether this matters
at all. A wargame, at the end of the day, is just a game. Historical accuracy
is less relevant than having fun. If I like to play Vikings against samurai
then that is my decision. I might even accept that it is ahistorical, a match
up has no bearing on reality, but if the game is the thing, and I have fun,
no-one is seriously going to challenge me, are they?

Of course, no-one is going to
challenge anything in particular. It is a game, we do not have to grant history
that much respect if we do not wish to. But the wargame is only then a bit of
fluff, a romantic comedy at Cannes. There is no particular meaning to a Viking
against Samurai match; it simply lives in a world of its own, cut off from any
meaning.

If we wish to take things only a
little more seriously, we have to have some regard to the changes that are
implied in the less sweeping views of history. These are the things that make
history to be history, after all. Prince Rupert’s cavalry did not behave like
the Chasseurs a Cheval of the Napoleonic era. They did not behave like the Gendarmes
of the previous century. They were, in short, themselves. Attempting to fit
Rupert’s cavalry into a different category will simply result in bits being
chopped off the original’s behaviour.

So, yes, there is a place for
sweeping rules which emphasise the continuities across history. A solider in
1501 did not behave differently, particularly, from one in 1499, even though we
might sweep the two into different eras, different rule sets. In which case a
set of rules covering 1499 – 1501 would be more accurate, at least in some uses
of the term ‘accurate’. But what they are will have to wait for another post.

Saturday, 6 August 2016

Historiography must be a really
odd thing. Historians, it seems, can be more driven by ideology than by, well,
given what I have said before, I hesitate to use to word ‘facts’, but if all
the usual caveats applying, historical facts. Interpretation against a matrix
of ideological concepts seems to be the way some history is done.

I, as no doubt many of you, will
know the sort of thing. The most obvious example in my experience is the
English Civil War, where you have Marxist concepts, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie,
encountering revisionist concepts, such as that King Charles I was fairly
useless as a monarch.

The thing that has always rather
intrigued me is that few of these committed historians seem to allow that both
sides could, in a sense, be correct. There is no particular reason, it seems to
me as a naïve and un-ideologically committed non-historian, why the rise of the
bourgeoisie could not run along in parallel with Charles I being a bit incompetent.
Maybe that is why I stay a humble physicist. All this political commitments is
a bit beyond me: your experiment works or it does not. An ideological commitment
to it working cuts no ice in nature.

In the August 2016 edition of
History Today, Professor Jeremy Black has a short piece about counterfactuals
in history. Professor Black has a bit of a track record in advocating
counterfactuals as part of the historical process. The idea, he suggests, is
that the historian could be able to see the possible decisions that historical
actors could have made, and, from the options available, obtain some idea as to
what might have happened (or at least, what might have been perceived by the
actor to be the likely outcome) and thus some idea of why the choice was made
as it was.

My usual example of this is
Prince Rupert at York. There he is, with a letter from his uncle which says,
basically ‘save York, save my crown; lose York, lose my crown’. He has just out-maneuvered
the Parliamentary and Scottish armies
that were besieging the place, and has to decide what to do next. He decided to
fight, and lost Marston Moor. Rupert has often been condemned for this
decision. But the question that a counterfactual analysis can ask is ‘what
other options did he have?’

He could, of course, have stayed
in York until his opponents marched away, but York had been besieged and there
may not have been enough food and fodder for his men. The besiegers, after all,
had eaten a fair bit during the siege, and the Royalist supply lines would have
been rather tenuous with three enemy armies in the offing.

Rupert could have reinforced York
with his foot and struck south with the cavalry. This would have almost
certainly have led Manchester’s army to follow him to protect their bases in
the Eastern Association. But that would still have left York besieged, by two
armies. Rupert would almost certainly have had to return to relieve it again.

Another option was to do what he
did, and fight. He could have delayed deploying and fought after the garrison
had recovered a bit, but that ran the risk of his opponents recovering from their
surprise at his being in York at all, and of Rupert’s army, which had been
dashing around the country relieving places for a couple of months, getting
stuck in York itself, which was not a great prospect, as already noted. Further
to this, his army was largely borrowed, and the longer they were away from
their bases, the more likely those bases would be captured by the enemy.

Even a quick look at his options
(and Rupert at this stage does not seem to be someone who indulged in lengthy
introspection and pondering of his options) seems to indicate that fighting,
and fighting fast, was the most likely option to obtain his objectives, that of
making York safe for the Royalists. Of course, it was a gamble, but the relief
of York itself was a gamble, and it had, at least, paid off. A similar
situation earlier in the year, at Newark, has similarly paid dividends. It is
probably that Rupert knew, as well, that the King needed a quick victory before
the resources of Parliament overwhelmed the Royalist cause.

A counterfactual analysis can
therefore help in working out why an individual acted in the way they did.
However, to return to ideology, there is in some ‘left’ history a view that
history is deterministic. Rupert would lose anyway, because Cromwell’s army was
made up of ideologically motivated proto-Marxists, and they were of the rising
merchant class and would inevitably conquer the world. Something like that, I
may be exaggerating a little. Counterfactuals turn that around and focus on the
events and decisions which people made. History is contingent; it is not just the
activity of forces over the ages which we are helpless to control.

In historiography, then,
counterfactuals tend to be the weapon of the ‘right’ against the determinism of
the ‘left’. Individuals can make a difference, they do have options. There is a
constant input of decision made into historical process. And this is where
wargaming might come in.

A historical wargame, of course,
is a sort of a model of some sort of historical situation. The set up, and the
existence of the battle at all, is not part of the decision matrix the gamers
have control over, but the process of the battle is. We can and do play the ‘what-if’
game. What if Rupert had deployed a few hundred meters further back? What if
the initial break in the Scot’s ranks had spread panic through the right wing? And
so on. A wargame is an overall processor of these sorts of contingencies and
decisions.

This is set against the ideas of
Marxist determinists. The outcome of the battle, according to this view, is
hardly relevant. What matters are the other factors, particularly the economic
factors, affecting both sides. On that basis, with control of the navy and of
London, Parliament wins. The rest is detail.

Without wishing to commit to the
ideology of either side, it does seem to me that history is a lot more complex
than the Marxists think.